Top 100 Work Of Art Quotes
#1. I see in the melody of Nature, God. It is a wonderful work of art. The spirit of the art is wonderful. And I feel that I am myself because I have never taken music lightly. Music is the manifestation of God, like everything else.
Pablo Casals
#2. We are probably the only artists in the world who have a 2,000-page book on a work of art that doesn't exist. But in this way, these projects reveal their identity through this whole process. When I'm starting, I only have the slightest idea of how the work of art will exist.
Christo
#3. If a work of art is a projection of feeling, its kinship with organic nature will emerge, no matter through how many transformations, logically and inevitably.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#4. A film that is a true work of art transcends theatre and heartwarmingly changes lives.
A.D. Posey
#5. If the work of art is to continue pursuing the vision of both being in and of the world but nevertheless in some fashion being more than just one more object to the mounting clutter, this is the specific point, I think, where this must be assured.
Brian Ferneyhough
#6. Tasting is an act of pleasure, and writing about that pleasure is an artistic gesture, but the only true work of art, in the end, is another person's feast.
Muriel Barbery
#7. A work of art is a work of order, and if the artist is to put the stamp of his own mind on his work, he must arrange, modify, and dispose of his materials so that they may appear in a more agreeable and beautiful manner than they would have assumed without his interference.
Henry Peach Robinson
#8. It was a work of art. It was better than that. It was a work of craft.
Terry Pratchett
#9. The work of art is an ostentatiously improbable occurrence.
Niklas Luhmann
#10. Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.
Michel Foucault
#11. The act of writing surprises me all the time. A miraculous thing happens when you have an idea and you want to convert it into words ... and then you start to create a work of art, and that's another miracle, and it remains mysterious to the writer, or to this writer anyway.
Janette Turner Hospital
#12. It seems to me a work of art is the evidence offered by a fantastically observant witness
John Banville
#13. Your life is a work of art that you will work on the rest of your life.
Richard Blanco
#14. The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death. The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men. The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small yes at the center of a vast no.
Gore Vidal
#15. You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. The work of art-sculpture or painting-forces your eye.
Clement Greenberg
#16. As soon as a work of art is of practical use, betrays a purpose or a tendency its beauty vanishes.
August Strindberg
#17. History may clarify our understanding of the supreme work of art, but can never account for it completely; for the Time of art is not the same as the Time of history.
Andre Malraux
#18. These guys are just flying through the air and I'm capturing them in the split second and putting it into a work of art, via clay to the bronze.
Richard MacDonald
#20. Contrary to the outstanding work of art, outstanding theory is susceptible to improvements.
Karl Popper
#21. No erotic work of art is filth if it is artistically significant; it is only turned into filth through the beholder if he is filthy.
Egon Schiele
#22. What lists and awards don't measure - and I feel this strongly - is the lasting value of any work of art. They're a snapshot of a moment, and one should always consider their judgments in that context.
Jennifer Egan
#23. The independence of art from worldview and worldview concerns is a myth. Every work of art is produced within a framework of worldview assumptions.
Douglas Wilson
#24. What the work of art looks like isn't too important.
Sol LeWitt
#25. What makes a good work of art is something that honors certain traditions and breaks with others.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#26. What interests me most is when a work of art is no longer just an object, but also touches reality and life.
Miuccia Prada
#27. In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.
Northrop Frye
#28. Imitation is not inspiration, and inspiration only can give birth to a work of art. The least of man's original emanation is better than the best of borrowed thought.
Albert Pinkham Ryder
#29. I want my whole life to be a great work of art, not just my art. And that means paying attention to my entire life and trying to make sure my whole life is balanced.
Jewel
#30. You turn your life into a work of art in order to redeem the ordinariness - a condition you are stuck with.
Robert Dessaix
#31. Every successful work of art is a collaboration between the known and the unknown.
Marty Rubin
#33. Literal thousands of Americans taking to the road and getting into that green automobile and just going. At the same time there is real incredible work [of art] that comes out of it. Never forget that.
Anne Waldman
#34. A Great Work of Art is one that truly moves and inspires you. You yourself must be moved. Don't look at art with others' eyes. Don't listen to music with others' ears. You must react to art with your own feelings, your own heart and mind.
Daisaku Ikeda
#35. The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.
Edward Steichen
#37. Every work of art belongs to his time. I would not paint again the Mona Lisa in the third dimension.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#38. Even in modern art, artists have used methods based on calculation, inasmuch as these elements, alongside those of a more personal and emotional nature, give balance and harmony to any work of art.
Max Bill
#40. In the Arab world, every work of art has a tiny flaw, so that it doesn't sacrilegiously compete with the perfection of God.
Ken Follett
#41. The English public takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.
Oscar Wilde
#42. They say the face tells all there is to know about a life, but I personally believe much can be deduced from the hands. There are lines and scars, bumps and calluses; indeed, the hands are both the sketch and the final work of art.
Jacqueline Winspear
#43. The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.
Herbert Read
#44. The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself, carry you away. It is the means by which the artist conveys his passion; it is the current which he puts forth which sweeps you along in his passion.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#45. The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.
Clive James
#46. I don't feel like literature has the power to alienate. I think that's something people feel if they don't connect with a work of art. But I don't think a work of art can actively reject the person who's looking at it or reading it.
Eleanor Catton
#47. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.
Susan Sontag
#48. What is more natural in a democratic age than that we should begin to measure the stature of a work of art-especially of a painting-by how widely and how well it is reproduced?
Daniel J. Boorstin
#50. ...for, in [William] Morris's words, 'a work of utility might also be a work of art, if we cared to make it so.
Ewan Clayton
#51. Not every work of art is or need be a heavily profound statement ...
Freeman Patterson
#52. No matter how consummate a work of art may seem, it is only an approximation of the original conception. It is the artist's consciousness of this discrepancy between his conception and the realization that assures his progress.
Edgard Varese
#53. I would make my job a work of art. I would like whatever it is that I'm doing - everyone's experience of me, everyone's interaction with me, everyone's discussion, conversation, relationship with me - [to be] an event within which they get to see who they are. I would make of my life a work of art.
John Denver
#54. Everyone should consider his body as a priceless gift from one whom he loves above all, a marvelous work of art, of indescribable beauty, and mystery beyond human conception, and so delicate that a word, a breath, a look, nay, a thought may injure it.
Nikola Tesla
#55. Thinking is seeing ... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.
Honore De Balzac
#56. Every work of art is a trick by which the artist manipulates appearances.
Edmund Wilson
#57. If you can't make art, make your life a work of art.
Andre Malraux
#58. To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.
Leo Tolstoy
#59. To believe in luck, you must believe that the universe is a roulette wheel and that instead of paying out to us what we have earned, it pays out only what it wishes. But it is not a spinning wheel of chance, it is a work of art, complete and framed by eternity.
Dean Koontz
#60. A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.
E. M. Forster
#61. Postmodernism shifts the basis of the work of art from the object to the transaction between the spectator and the object and further deconstructs this by negating the presence of a representative objective viewer.
Arnold Aronson
#62. It is my greatest joy to live a really good part, even though it imposes great strain. An artist is tired but proud when he has created a great work of art. So it is with the actor who really lives a great role and is proud of the part he played.
Conrad Veidt
#63. I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove ... that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#64. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.
~Waddington
W. Somerset Maugham
#65. The work of art which I do not make, none other will ever make.
Simone Weil
#66. A thousand years makes economics silly and a work of art endures for ever, but it is very difficult to do and now it is not fashionable.
Ernest Hemingway,
#67. The work of art will bring to light a new order inherent in things, and this will be: the idea of unity.
Ferdinand Hodler
#68. Men do not know why they award fame to one work of art rather than another. Without being in the faintest connoisseurs, they think to justify the warmth of their commendations by discovering it in a hundred virtues, whereas the real ground of their applause is inexplicable
it is sumpathy.
Thomas Mann
#69. Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of ... recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it ...
William Gaddis
#70. To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was ...
Pablo Picasso
#71. A work of art is an act of love. Critics are crab lice.
David Gerrold
#72. As a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational; its freedom of stylization is limited by the requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible subject, it ceases to be art.
Ayn Rand
#73. I collect firearms, and I've got a Winchester, an Indian rifle. It has tacks for every warrior that was shot, like notches on a pistol, and it's got feathers and beads hanging off it. It's like a work of art.
Joe Perry
#74. The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.
Pope Paul VI
#75. When God created you, He went to great lengths to make you exactly the way He wanted you to be. You are His ultimate work of art.
Victoria Osteen
#76. Art goes on in your head. If you said something interesting, that might be a title for a work of art and I'd write it down.
Damien Hirst
#77. The true work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.
Wassily Kandinsky
#78. If you end your story, it's a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don't, it belongs to anyone's imagination. It stays alive forever.
Jodi Picoult
#79. I think every work of art is an act of faith, or we wouldn't bother to do it. It is a message in a bottle, a shout in the dark. It's saying, 'I'm here and I believe that you are somewhere and that you will answer if necessary across time, not necessarily in my lifetime.
Jeanette Winterson
#81. ... what I told them was 'a poem,' a thing made by a maker, a work of art, part history of long ago, part invention.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#82. To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.
Madeleine L'Engle
#83. Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building.
A. Bartlett Giamatti
#84. Few people recognize that when they're moved by a work of art, they're moved by an artist's ability to solve a problem that is often a long-standing, timeless one.
Anonymous
#85. I feel I have a responsibility to myself, a responsibility to explain where we're coming from. Because a song or the performance of a song is a lot like a work of art.
Axl Rose
#88. Without an element of vulgarity, no man can be a work of art ... I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise.
Quentin Crisp
#89. It could be argued that the reaction to a work of art is a creative act which is the counterpart of the action of the artist.
Frank Willett
#90. The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends ...
Max Beerbohm
#91. I declare peace as the greatest work of art.
Wolf Vostell
#92. I believe that any great work of art is, in itself, a form of resistance against a sense of powerlessness.
Thom Yorke
#93. I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.
George Steiner
#94. How should an artist begin to do his work as an artist? I would insist that he begin his work as an artist by setting out to make a work of art.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#95. We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.
Clive Bell
#96. Like you were a work of art that I wanted to lock away because no one would ever appreciate your rare beauty like I would?
Lorelei James
#97. The purpose of the painter is simply to reproduce in other minds the impression which a scene has made upon him. A work of art does not appeal to the intellect. It does not appeal to the moral sense. Its aim is to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an emotion.
George Inness
#98. Religion is a barbarous obsidian knife poised over our chests put it in a cabinet and admire it as a work of art, but don't ever wield the damned thing ever again.
PZ Myers
#99. Awareness of approach to death can be a beautiful thing, a frame into which we can put the work of art that is our life, our personal masterpiece.
June Singer
#100. An eyewitness account is evidence that an artist has proposed a work of art. But documentary evidence (i.e. a photograph) is more conclusive.
Dieter Roth
